Raft of Stars by Andrew Graff (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📕

quietly on the cedar logs, folded his legs like Bread’s. He didn’t know Bread’s trouble. Another branch filled with noisy finches passed overhead. The sky turned from dark purple to blue.

Bread closed his eyes. “I used to sit out behind my house,” he said, “and ask God to kill my dad. That’s true about me, just so you know.”

Fish sat entirely still.

“And when he didn’t die, I dared God to kill me if that’s what he’d rather do.” Bread exhaled heavily through his nose. “You know what God did?”

Fish shook his head. Bread looked away from Fish and held up the bullet casing between his fingers. He turned over the blackened brass husk once or twice in the early-morning light, and then he flicked it into the river. It made the smallest noise when it broke the surface, tiny as a frog slipping off a rock.

“God didn’t do nothing, Fish. Nothing.”

Fish did know what it felt like to think that. He remembered the silent ceiling of his bedroom that first winter, the way blankets hid him, silence answering silence. But he remembered, too, his mom’s prayers, the strange comfort that came when she laid her hands on him, murmured bubblings of the spirit, deep calling to deep. He was always reluctant to accept it. It was a warmth from outside him. That’s all Fish could call it if asked to describe it—in the middle of a cold, dark river, warmth. Fish would pray for Bread right now if he knew he could give him that feeling, but he didn’t know how to, or if he should. Fish couldn’t untangle this sort of knot. Instead, he was struck again by his friend’s strength, and shame fell on him, and he suddenly needed to tell Bread the truth about his own dad. He wanted to confess he was a liar, that there was no father waiting at the armory, that they were drifting toward something that didn’t exist, that they were more alone than Bread even knew. Tears rose in Fish’s eyes. The raft turned in the current. All was a tangle of trees and cattails and wilderness. It all looked the same. Fish felt the rising terror of lost hope.

“Bread,” he said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

Bread shook his head.

This made Fish’s chest tighten. He had to whisper as he spoke. “You don’t understand.”

Bread looked at him, stubbornness in his eyes. “Fish, if you didn’t come back when you did, and done what you did—” He stopped. “It was different this time. Worse.”

Fish’s vision blurred.

“Bread. There’s something you don’t know. My dad—”

As he opened his mouth to confess, the shoreline broke open with noise. Branches cracked. River grass fell down in heaps. There was the sound of something yelling, or screaming. It filled the forest and sent Bread and Fish scrambling to their feet. The closest thing to it that Fish ever heard was the baying of a calf, but there weren’t any calves in the woods, not this far out. The river grass thrashed again and moved in waves, along with that awful baying. It sounded tortured, whatever it was.

And then the boys saw it, saw them.

A black bear cub bounded onto the shoreline near the trees. It scrambled and fell and turned onto its back and kicked its legs at four attacking coyotes. The coyotes took turns lunging at the cub, distracting it, dividing its defenses.

Fish glanced over at Bread, who was staring openmouthed at the cruelty of the scene unfolding before them. The cub bayed and lashed out at one of the coyotes’ snouts, gained its feet again, and bolted twenty yards farther downstream. The coyotes sprinted and caught it easily, nipping at the cub’s haunches. The cub fell again and lifted its paws. The coyotes circled, and the cub twisted and lashed out as each one came in snapping and growling. The coyotes moved so quickly and with such precision, and the cub so comparatively slowly and with such panic, that it was clear who would eventually win.

Fish saw Bread rustling around in his pack. When Bread stood up, he was holding the revolver.

“Gimme the rest of them shells, Fish!”

Fish dug into the chest pocket of his flannel. He scooped out the four remaining cartridges and handed them to Bread.

“What are you gonna do?” Fish asked. He found himself short of breath. He knew things had to kill to eat. He and his grandfather killed to eat. But to watch it like this, coyotes taking out a cub with their teeth, was horrible to witness.

“I’m gonna shoot off them coyotes,” said Bread, fitting the thick cartridges into the massive cylinder. His hands shook as he did it, but he managed to close the thing and cocked the hammer and took aim.

Fish, seeing it coming this time, covered his ears. Bread narrowed his eyes at the coyotes, and the barrel drifted a bit as it found a mark. Bread’s hands tightened on the grip and his finger began to squeeze. Even with his ears covered, Fish could still hear the awful baying of the cub, but when he turned toward the revolver’s point of aim, squinting in anticipation of the muzzle blast, the cedars behind the coyotes exploded, and it wasn’t from a gunshot. Bread never fired. The trees shook to their tops. A strange blackness shot forward, quick as an owl’s shadow. The coyote nearest the shadow yelped, cartwheeled, and landed, still as a stone, in the mud.

Fish took his hands from his ears. And then he heard it, and then he saw it, the massive shadow spiked with black hackles, raging through the underbrush, attacking the coyotes, moaning with wrath so great it shook the river and made Fish’s knees go weak. It was a black bear, a very big one. The remaining coyotes recoiled in panic. The cub regained its footing and scrambled up the nearest birch tree. The cub reached a fork in the trunk and sat baying into the morning sky as its mother killed.